Google’s Fuchsia OS will have native support in the company’s fork of Apple’s Swift programming language, according to Googler Zac Bowling, who works on both Swift and Fuchsia. Bowling’s Tweet was in response to a curious soul asking about what Google was doing with Swift. This move means, theoretically, that iOS apps may be easy to port over to Fuchsia, so long as they don’t rely on any Apple proprietary code built into iOS. It also means that coders who create apps in Swift for iOS or any other OS could easily create a Fuchsia version just by replacing any proprietary code. It is worth noting that Zac and his team previously worked on helping Google to get native Objective-C into Android.
This is the first of anything even remotely public and official that Google has made of Fuchsia in quite some time. The source has been available on GitHub from the start, with those in the know able to watch the development as it happens. The general public wouldn’t really think to look there, however, and without press releases, even the press was rarely alerted to significant new developments with the upcoming OS. The codebase has been plenty active over the past year, and Google has even opened up Fuchsia to allow others to fork it for commercial use, so long as they don’t claim it to be their own work or use its name in a promotional fashion.
Still, in its current state, Fuchsia OS is still unclear in its purpose and function. It could be a slick OS with a great deal of potential, but its current incarnation does not seem to target any OS or use case in particular for supplanting. In fact, its native language support lineup seems to say the opposite; Fuchsia appears to be able to work alongside or in place of a number of mobile-focused OSes, with support for common languages like Go, Rust, and Google’s perennial favorite for its internal programs, Python. It’s worth noting that Fuchsia does not run on a Linux core like Android does, and its UI, along with some other functions, are built on Google’s cross-platform Flutter architecture.